Weeknotes 10

24 May 2019

1. If you’re paying attention, you may have noticed that I’ve missed a few weeks of this here weeknotes project. Oh well, here we are, I’m not going to beat myself up about it.

2. I’ve been digesting a number of resources that Jussi Pasenen has linked to. They tend to centre around an acceptance of ecological and societal collapse within a lifespan from now, and the question of what it means to live and act in a way that is meaningful in this context.

3. I listened to an interview with Jem Bendall on the Future is Beautiful podcast: Jem Bendell on Deep Adaptation, Climate Change and Societal Collapse. I thought the host, Amisha Ghadiali, did an excellent job of holding the space in what was really quite a solemn conversation. From her introduction:

   I want to share that my intention of offering this conversation is not to alarm or cause fear but to open this space of freedom. I feel it’s important we don’t attach too deeply to any notion of fear and projection. The world is always changing, and nature is leading the way, so perhaps this is the collapse of some of the systems that aren’t serving us, especially the economic basis of our global society. This is the natural cycle of death and rebirth. How can we detach from the system we have grown up in? How can we let go of this system and allow something else to rise?

4. I read through a talk by Rupert Read titled This civilisation is finished: So what is to be done?. It’s presented as an academic paper but is quite readable. There’s also a video version.

   What the ecopsychologists argue is that the despair, the fear, the sadness, the rage that we feel in this kind of context is rational and could even be described as a kind of consciousness arising from the earth itself. In short: We are nature coming to an awareness of what we are doing to ourselves. In the sense that we are feeling what we are doing to our beautiful planetary home; and those kind of feelings are appropriate.

5. This article was also worthwhile: In Facing Mass Extinction, We Must Allow Ourselves to Grieve.

   ‘Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well,’ Czech dissident, writer, and statesman Václav Havel said, ‘but the certainty that something is worth doing no matter how it turns out.’

6. Finally, a related article via Kai Brach: How do we go on? The author asks a number of academics where they find their optimism, given that they know a lot about the crisis we are facing.

7. Okay, if you’ve got this far, sorry for such a sombre post. Here’s a nice quote from David Suzuki:

   The way we see the world shapes the way we treat it. If a mountain is a deity, not a pile of ore; if a river is one of the veins of the land, not potential irrigation water; if a forest is a sacred grove, not timber; if other species are biological kin, not resources; or if the planet is our mother, not an opportunity – then we will treat each other with greater respect. Thus is the challenge, to look at the world from a different perspective.